Jennifer B. called me yesterday with an urgent problem. She had just come from being hammered in a budget meeting. Management not only wanted a 10% reduction in average time to hire, but also said her costs were out of line. With the deadline looming for a response, she either had to satisfactorily defend her department’s performance or, in her words, think about other work. You could hear the stress in her voice: I’ve been in this business a long time, and sometimes I wonder if they have the slightest idea what we do.
Jennifer's company employs about 1,500 people and recruits roughly 250 people annually, using two full-time, in-house recruiters who work requisitions end to end. Her average time to hire is about 49 days and that includes everyone from entry-level warehouse workers to managers. Her two recruiters carry between 30 and 60 requisitions each at any one time. She knows she runs a tight ship and that her people are working flat out. She just doesn’t think she can do much better with the resources she has available. Did I have any benchmarks she could use to defend her performance?
It’s vital when working with benchmarks to understand the history behind the numbers, or the “back story.” No two companies work the same way or have the same goals and issues. A praiseworthy performance in one case may be lackluster in another.
In Jennifer's case, the more we worked the numbers, the more it became clear that she was in fact doing quite well, even very well, within the constraints of her company’s recruiting system. The real problem lay in that system being ultra-traditional and incapable of much improvement. We uncovered the following issues.
Requisitions – Jennifer works in a “demand” system where requisitions coming in from line managers first have to be approved by senior managers, and only then are put into the system. Hiring managers are mentally calculating time to hire from the date the requisitions leave their desks; the actual recruiting process, however, may not start until a full week later.
Planning - Because requisitions arrive unannounced, Jennifer has very little ability to plan her workloads in advance. When demand is heavy, everyone just has to work harder and longer. There is no ability to pre-recruit for high demand periods.
Outsourcing – Management frowns on outsourcing, even when hiring demand is particularly heavy. Their stock response to overload is, “Well, just work harder. That’s what we have to do.” Outsourcing is “expensive,” therefore an unnecessary cost. And the far more consequential, longer-term secondary costs like candidate quality, worker retention and recruiting staff turnover are not relevant up front.
Communication – Hiring managers rule. Staffing’s job is to do what they are told to do. Other than the same company name on their paychecks, the two parties are not equal partners in the common task of finding the best performers who can make the most money for the company.
Structure – The department structure is outdated. Feeding 250 job fills per year through two people who have to handle every aspect of the hire isn’t recruiting, it’s herding sheep. Jennifer's department desperately needs to expand and specialize: one researcher, three recruiters to handle assessment and selection, and a scheduler/admin type. There should also be one or two trusted outsourcing relationships to handle emergencies and overload.
Retention – Management isn’t concerned about yearly turnover of nearly 17%, even in a poor economy. They are apparently used to that kind of attrition, blaming it on poor recruiting, competition, and poor worker attitudes, rather than on the real cause, poor management.
Poor metrics – Time, cost and quality are always linked. Unfortunately, Jennifer's management has separated these, perhaps because no one ever taught them otherwise. They are also handling their statistics badly, lumping all hires regardless of job level or hiring difficulty into one big bucket. The TTH average is being distorted by the relatively small number of management searches, which can take much longer (up to 210 days!) than the typical search.
Jennifer and I put together solid numbers that she felt gave her some ground to stand on. But after the call, I worried. When good people meet bad systems, which in her case means a combination of outdated attitudes, roles, and processes, the system usually wins. And with cost and time as the fixations, Jennifer is trapped in a race to the bottom. There is always a way to cut costs – ten more reqs on the pile, or maybe a part-time recruiter instead of full-time, or a lower manager’s salary – until finally her recruiters quit. Or Jennifer quits.
Or, as the economy improves a bit and hiring becomes even more competitive, the whole antiquated system finally breaks.
Related Reading
Is the Business Model for the Corporate Recruiting Department Fundamentally Flawed?
The Best-Time Recruiting Strategy Avoids the Pitfalls of Coincidence Hiring
Determining the Appropriate Requisition Load for a Recruiter |
